“...Sometimes we were assigned the task of making up our own, taking pleasure in coming up with wild Proustian wanderings that—kicking and screaming—had to be corralled, harassed, and made to trot into the barn in neat rows.”
This was my favorite description of how students managed to diagram their most challenging sentences. Although the subject itself was not the most interesting to me, I enjoyed the writer’s enthusiasm over this “lost skill.” It wasn’t what her essay was about, that made it appealing, but how she wrote it that made me enjoy the essay. She seemed to give life to these sentence diagrams. They became characters and portraits. “In my experience they didn’t exactly diagram themselves; they had to be coaxed, if not wrestled.” She also converted her diagram into a portrait of a highway complete with its “many exit ramps.”
I came to appreciate her knowledge of grammar too. I’m only comfortable with the noun, verb, and the adjective. She mentioned the predicate, the object, the dependant, the modifier, and the article. It makes me think that I should have diagrammed sentences too.
Lastly, I like the essay because I realized that non-fiction writers can really write about everything. Anything. From the thrill of diagramming a sentence to weasels, and buses—anything. This couldn’t have come at a better time. I was struggling with ideas for our first assignment, but now I’m more at ease.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Yes, I completely agree with you that with these essays that we read for class, I too I have come to find that creative non-fiction can be written about anything.
As for the story being interesting I am glad that you got some joy out of it but as for me her story was not all too fun to read. I felt it just dragged on about those sentences. I can see how you liked the emotion the writer put into her writing about the learning adn still using the skill that she learned but that is all I liked.
I also thought that it had a good lesson with all that we learn, it amazes me that most of those rules of writing are thrown out the window and a lot of people just go into writing just to write and use none of those rules.
Post a Comment